Embodiment in this sense, then, is a name for the moment-by-moment experience of our existence as living bodies, with all the joy and grief, pleasure and pain, power and vulnerability which that involves.

Embodiment in this sense, then, is a name for the moment-by-moment experience of our existence as living bodies, with all the joy and grief, pleasure and pain, power and vulnerability which that involves.

— Nick Totton

Somatic Regulation 2019

Description

Mindfulness and Somatic Regulation:

A Response-side Approach to Healing Developmental Trauma

We often hear clients say that they feel like their body was hijacked in the face of a triggering event. They can’t think, their nervous system seems to have a mind of its own. They lose their sense of home with their sense of self compromised. Mindfulness and somatic regulation practices can be key factors in returning to a secure experience of their felt-sense, a return home to safety.

The integration of mindfulness and somatic awareness into therapeutic practice is often misunderstood and frequently misused. However, a somatically grounded, neuroaffective and psychodynamically informed perspective can support our clients to transform their adaptive strategies.

Somatic therapies engage cognitive, behavioral, emotional, neurobiological and energetic systems to help clients become more organized and alive. Interventions are bi-directional, moving from cognition to neurobiology and from neurobiology to cognition. As we say, somatic therapists work top-down and bottom-up.